We’ve heard a lot in recent days from assorted manosphere dudes about how the “slut vote” – and the endless hunger of our nation’s “sluts” for free contraception – helped to bring about a humiliating end to Romney’s presidential hopes. The sluts went for Obama, we heard, because he promised them (and women in general) what they supposedly want most: “free stuff without ever having to work.”
Minus the word “slut,” this was the basic argument we’ve heard over the past week from a lot of right-wingers as well, including such big names as Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, who’ve been loudly complaining that Obama won over women – and minorities – by promising to give them “stuff.”
Well, today, a new voice joined this chorus: Mitt Romney himself. In a conference call today with some of his big donors – no doubt a fairly dispirited bunch – Romney offered this explanation for his defeat:
The Obama campaign was following the old playbook of giving a lot of stuff to groups that they hoped they could get to vote for them and be motivated to go out to the polls, specifically the African American community, the Hispanic community and young people. … In each case they were very generous in what they gave to those groups.
Never mind, as the Los Angeles Times points out, that Romney lost in some key states that have a minimal minority population, or that Romney’s promised tax cuts could be considered gigantic gifts to the rich.
While Romney talked less about gender than he did about race and enthnicity, he did single out one group that he said Obama had been especially generous to: young women. And you all know the easiest way to bribe a young female voter. As Romney put it:
Free contraceptives were very big with young, college-aged women.
Apparently the government has been shipping out birth control pills along with those Obama Phones.
Leave it to the Men’s Rightsers to come up with an even more ingeniously loopy explanation for Romney’s defeat than even Karl Rove has managed to come up with. According to the anonymous blogger behind the Christian Men’s Defense Network blog, on the far-right fringe of the already pretty fringey Men’s Rights movement, the thing that brought Romney down was “the slut vote.”
Matt Forney, your argument sounds dubious at best.
Hey, ladies! You know how the dudes of the so-called manosphere are always saying horrible shit about you? They’re not doing it out of hate. No, no, they’re doing it for your own good! In a guest post on the blog Freedom Twenty-Five, Matt Forney offers women his own brand of tough (alleged) love:
Aside from Men Going Their Own Way and others who have sworn off women altogether, the almost-exclusively straight dudes of the manosphere devote an incredible amount of time trying to figure out how to get into the pants of young, hot, “fertile” women in their teens and twenties, and complain bitterly about the terrible injustice they suffer when these women refuse to have sex with them.
And then they turn around and attack women in their thirties for actually wanting to have sex with them – because these women have committed the dastardly crime of having sex with other men when they were younger. In the parlance of our times the manosphere, this is known as “riding the cock carousel.”
Today we have a lovely example of this latter phenomenon, from prolific manosphere commenter “Deti,” who attacked former “carousel riders” in this rant he left in the comments on The Woman and the Dragon. (There may be lots of equally horrible things in the comments there as well; I haven’t looked. I found Deti’s comment because it was highlighted as a piece of great wisdom on The Private Man, yet another terrible manosphere blog.)
The so-called manosphere may be a tiny (if noisy) corner of the internet, but here’s yet another reminder that many of its, er, “values” are shared by people other than angry Spearhead commenters and NWOslave. Some of these people even have access to real power. At the Values Voters conference this week, at which Republican VP contender Paul Ryan gave a talk, a group called Modesty Matters distributed flyers whose text reads as if it had been cribbed from posts on The Thinking Housewife or the CoAlpha Brotherhood forum.
Modesty Matters criticized women for dressing “immodestly” at church, and blamed women for causing men to stare lustfully at them.
Women must “embrace MODESTY in dress and behavior,” one of the handouts read. Women dressed immodestly in church are “an insult to a holy God,” another said.
Some other choice bits highlighted by ThinkProgress:
From the “Modesty: It’s nothing to be ashamed of” pamphlet: “Since men are particularly visual, immodesty in church can trigger lustful thoughts.”
“My men’s bible study group talks frequently about controlling our lust, thoughts, and eyes. Yes the problem and responsibility are ours, but is it really reasonable for the women of the church to make it THIS difficult for us?”
From the “True Woman Manifesto”: “All women, whether married of single, are to model femininity in their various relationships, by exhibiting a distinctive modesty, responsiveness, and gentleness of spirit.”
Frankly, I don’t think women are completely responsible for all of this terrible immodesty.
Obviously, James Brown deserves part of the blame as well. Here’s footage of him lobbying congress on the controversial “hot pants” issue:
Yeah, why would anyone want gamer dudes to modify their behavior in any way? From Fat, Ugly or Slutty. Click image for the original post.
So the top post in the Men’s Rights subreddit for a time yesterday, with hundreds of upvotes, was a post devoted to the question: “Why should male gamers change their behavior?” Yep, apparently the sacred right of men and boys to harass women and girls on Xbox live is one of the most important Men’s Rights issues of the day. Here’s how the OP, IsItRacistToAsk, framed the issue:
[G]amers themselves (until relatively recently) were a 90% male community. This goes back really far if you count non-video-game games (like Dungeons and Dragons and the like). Now all of a sudden they’re expected to just behave differently because some girls want to join?
I’m not saying girls shouldn’t be welcome in gaming communities, I’m just comparing them to someone who shows up, uninvited, to a house party and demands everyone go out and get blue plastic cups because red offends her.
JohnTheOther, blabby videoblogger and Number Two at A Voice for Men, has now weighed in with his own, slightly tardy, manifesto on the Aurora shooting and the evils of supposed male “disposability.” I didn’t read the whole thing – seriously, dude, OMIT NEEDLESS WORDS – but a few things stood out when I skimmed it. For example, this lovely passage, which seems to be a longer and fouler version of that ill-advised tweet from the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto that I mentioned in my last post.
Our mainstream, which is to say, our corporate media – that which bends and fawns for access to the corrupt elected officials and modern robber barons of corporate statehood – is telling you, young man, that in order to be worthwhile, a real man, you’d better be prepared to die without complaint for the child, or the little old lady, or the drug addled slut in the next seat.
But Mr. TheOther is having none of it:
The instinct – expressing itself variously as chivalry or as fatal self sacrifice — is just one more that no longer has any discernable benefit. It is an encumbrance to any real pursuit of a civilized society in which one class of humans is not legally and socially elevated over another.
Sorry, kids; sorry, old ladies; sorry “drug addled sluts” — you’re on your own. Apparently, in a truly civilized society, no one ever looks out for anyone else. Altruism is for barbarians and Bill Bennett!
Here’s JtO’s stirring conclusion:
Those three men are not heroes, they’re just dead. The calculus of death, where one life is traded in celebration for another by preference of a vagina, is pathological and regressive. It must be recognized as the sickness it is. Those who lionized these men, whose fatal and unexamined instinct led to self-destruction; those who held them up as a heroic example to follow, are cordially invited to go first — or to go fuck themselves.
Charming as always, Mr. TheOther.
In the discussion of Mr. TheOther’s post in the Men’s Rights Subreddit, AVFM’s Paul Elam expands on the whole they aren’t heroes” theme, arguing that we need to retroactively strip away the hero status of the three men who died protecting their girlfriends — because they died protecting women.
A talented journalist, playwright and activist died last weekend in a car crash shortly after graduating from Yale. Marina Keegan was 22. Before she died, she wrote an essay for the Yale Daily News urging her classmates to keep alive the sense of possibility they brought with them when they first arrived at college:
We’re so young. We’re so young. We’re twenty-two years old. We have so much time. There’s this sentiment I sometimes sense, creeping in our collective conscious as we lay alone after a party, or pack up our books when we give in and go out – that it is somehow too late. That others are somehow ahead. More accomplished, more specialized. More on the path to somehow saving the world, somehow creating or inventing or improving. …
What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over. Get a post-bac or try writing for the first time. … We’re so young. We can’t, we MUST not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it’s all we have.
Over on the Spearhead, W.F. Price notes her death, and quotes these words, and more, from her essay. His point? That she was wrong.
By the time you hit 25 or so – just three years out of college – your life is pretty much set, he argues, and “your future can be fairly well predicted by your life at that point.” And this apparently goes double for women. Price titles his post: “After 25, Women Are Just Wasting Time.”
And why is that? Because if they’re not married to a good earner by then, or at least with the guy they plan to settle down with, they’re fucked. While an “average girl,” as Price puts it, should have snagged her future husband by age 21, non-average college girls buy themselves only a few more years.
As Price explains it:
Four years of college buys women precious little time in the mating market. … I’d guess … about exactly as much time as it takes for them to complete it, because their pool of future mates tends to go through the same process … That’s to say that she has her best shot to land a good match up to perhaps 25.
There are a few, well, let’s just call them plot holes in Price’s story here, but let’s hear him out:
The problem with young women today is that they internalize this “anything is possible” attitude and don’t lose it until it really is too late for many of them. They think they can do better at 30 than at 22, which, in most cases, is simply wrong. Some might say that family and men are not a priority for these girls, but women for whom this is really true throughout life are an insignificant minority. In fact, most women are holding out precisely because they think they can get a better man later, perhaps when they have a better job and work with more powerful men.
But these girls are not going to change fundamentally, and in their early 20s are at the peak of their beauty while still retaining an innocent charm. Nothing about their looks or personality is going to make them more appealing at 30 than at 22, and the men available to them are not going to get any better, either….
The point is that neither men nor women change fundamentally past a certain point, and the same guys young women have available in their early 20s are generally the same guys that will be available at 30, only they will be older and, due to marriage, there will be far fewer of them.
Yep, we’re back to the hoary old story of the bad boy cock carousel once again. Better grab hold of a good hearted beta while the getting is good, ladies – because by the time you finish off your slutty dalliances with the bad boy alphas your looks will be gone and no man (alpha or beta) will want to have anything to do with you.
Price continues, cranking the melodrama up to eleven:
Time tends to accelerate past a certain age, and the 25-year old woman soon finds herself 30, and then 35, and at that point she’s got precious little of it left. Perhaps at 22 she was laughing about the “comical” notion that it could ever be too late, but after a certain point it is no longer comedy, but tragedy, and her laughter turns to tears.
Now, none of this is original, and none of it is true. What’s interesting is just how badly misogynistic manospherians want it to be true. They must, because they tell this same story to themselves over and over and over, like small children requesting their parents to read their favorite bedtime story “again!” They (the misogynists, not the children) love the idea that the women who turned them down – or who, at the very least, rejected their brand of patronizing patriarchy – will get their comeuppance in the end, the more humiliating, the better.
Price at least pretends to care about the women he’s trying to scare straight (into marriage). But some of the commenters on his site can’t be bothered to contain their glee at the notion of spurned thirtysomething women collapsing into tears.
But why shouldn’t women feel this way? Women “can have it all.” They are “fabulous.” Women rule. Women first. Women are 20 when they’re 30, and 30 when their 40. Women, women, women.
Screech, crash, halt! (Then comes reality when the cuteness wears off and the pounds set in….).
[M]en do age better than women. I looked around at the women and they all just looked old to me. I could not imagine myself with any of them. They had lost whatever charm they had and I found attractive the last time I had seen them. Almost all of the men that were there with their spouses were with younger women. …
As for the women specifically, while they all seemed old, I noted that the happiest of the lot talked about their family. Some of them were married, some of them divorced, but in both cases they talked about their kids. They were clearly the most fulfilled. Many of the other women than I knew had pursued consuming careers were not at the reunion. Those that were, and who did not have children, had a whiff of pain on their faces. They seemed to be looking around and suddenly forced to face the consequences of their choices.
Or maybe they noticed that a patronizing douche was giving them the once-over, and shot him a dirty look.
The problem with college today is that it teaches a woman that she has an IQ of 115 so naturally she spends her time chasing after men who she perceives to be her “equal”, the top 15% of the men within society. Or to put it another way, a college educated woman thinks she’s better than 85% of everybody else.
Sorry honey the only thing your degree in liberal arts or communications tells me is that you have IQ above 100. Which means you’re better than the bottom 50% of society. No other conclusions can be made. Of course most women will never understand this. They will spend the rest of their bitter lives believing the reason why they couldn’t get Mr. Right is because men are afraid of a strong and smart women.
What Mira [sic] is expressing, her not needing a man, that precisely because she doesnt need a man she can get everything she wants, well into her 50′s …
She’s accepted her feminist brainwashed idiocy & tried to turn it into a social norm
Her fantasy entails her getting an education, & competing in cut-throat environments designed for men … which require a male intolerance for anything not rational or logic
All the while her fantasy involves a child as an accessory & strong alpha thug, who’ll rescue her instead of pumping & dumping her to kingdom come …
Her vagina also gives her magical powers to screw over sex hungry beta’s without game, as a backup plan, if the jamaican thugs from her sex tourism never get round to playing captain save-a hoe, when she hits 30 …
Beta’s, a deranged feminists insurance policy, for when her vagina no longer cashes cheques she cant write …
Our old pal JeremiahMRA (a.k.a. Things Are Bad) suggests, in a series of comments, that we should push the whole timetable up a few years, forcing girls to get married to whomever their fathers say shortly after puberty. No, really, that’s his actual argument:
Honestly women shouldn’t be going to college at all. It’s a complete waste and takes away from people who can actually get something from education: men. The only reason they do it is to inflate their egos….
[I]t’s more accurate that after puberty, women are just wasting time. Wasting time slutting around, going to school, working, when they should be getting married to whomever their fathers say and having children, which is really all women are good at.
Today women choose mates based solely on lust and greed. Women don’t love, the only thing they love is getting fucked hard and being provided for by a man or the government. This is why in any sane (patriarchal) society a girl’s father decides who she is to marry.
Lovely.
Most of these comments got dozens of upvotes, with only a handful of downvotes. Jeremiah’s comments, a bit reactionary even for The Spearhead, got more than a few downvotes, but still only a fraction as many as the upvotes they got. Only Rmaxd got more downvotes than up, perhaps because his comments made no fucking sense.
So nice that The Spearheaders have taken the time from their day to honor the memory of a promising writer whose life was cut short.
From Liberty University’s dress code for women (and, evidently, mannikins). Click on the picture for more details.
We’ve heard before from numerous MRAs and MGTOWers and other backwards dudes that women who dress like “sluts” deserve to be raped. You may remember my post about the patriarchy-loving MGTOWer who calls himself Drealm, who thinks that immodest dress is an assault on men, because it excites them without giving them the opportunity to, well, rape the women who so cruelly give them boners. In Drealm’s mind, almost any form of clothing on a woman that in any way shows her shape is suspect – as does uncovered female hair.
Obviously, I think all of us will agree that certain kinds of clothes are inappropriate in certain settings – no one of any gender should be teaching kindergarteners wearing nothing but a thong – but invariably those who complain the most about women wearing “immodest clothing” have a much broader notion of “immodesty,” which includes things that most of us just consider “clothing” – shorts, short skirts, any top that shows even the tiniest amount of cleavage. (Click on the picture above to see more about Liberty University’s dress code for women.)
Unfortunately, this kind of thinking is not confined to religious fundamentalists and weird dudes lurking in the dark corners of internet. Recently, Laura Wood, the self-identified Thinking Housewife behind the blog of the same name, has declared that “immodest dress is a form of aggression.” The heart of her post is a reposted comment from a reader posting under the name of Arete, arguing that immodest dress is a form of violence towards men similar to and in some ways even worse than actual violence from men towards women.
Immodest dress is analogous to male violence. Men who flaunt their muscles and crush beer can’s with their fists (not that I have seen much of that lately) are telling the weaker world around them, “I could crush you. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t.We’ll see. Depends how much you annoy me.” Women are stronger than men in this one way – the sight of their women’s bodies is overpowering to men. Immodest women are saying to men, “You could have sex with me, if I let you. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. It depends how much you annoy me.”
Both behaviors are flaunting the power that one has over another weaker being and both behaviors used to be considered uncouth.
But as the myth goes: only men have ever been violent towards women not the other way around (women have no power over men whatsoever – don’t you know!) and so now that we have entered the great age of woman – when she will get her revenge for all the injustices against her by men through the ages – both real and imagined — she has decided to take her “pound of flesh.” But instead of a swift cut right above the heart like Shylock she wants to get men where it really hurts– tease and taunt with the sight of her own body, forever reminding men of their weakness before female power.
So apparently a woman giving a man a boner by wearing an outfit less modest than a nun’s is worse than a dude literally punching a woman.
Laura’s comments make clear she agrees with this basic assessment, though (in a moment of generosity towards her own gender) she acknowledges that some women may not be conscious of the enormous power they wield over men every time they put on a tank top.
In the comments, Fitgerald expresses his enthusiasm for Arete’s thesis:
This is sooooo true… as a male I can ABSOLUTELY attest to this. …
As a celibate male I must actively work at constraining sexual response to females flaunting their wares.. “You could have sex with me, if I let you. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t.”.. yeah right. If I was an alpha male – strong, thin, tall, tanned.. definitely — I’ll also have to be honest and say it does piss me off, but suppressing ordinary human responses is part and parcel of not only being a civilized human being, but a Christian which constrains me further. …
Women are the sexual power brokers. They can and do decide with whom they pair and mate with. Men are essentially powerless save those few well endowed “alphas” (rich, physical specimens, powerful) who are like kryptonite to many women. Any male that is half-aware knows the look: “Yes.. look at me.. I’m sexually desirable. See my power. Feel my power..” Oh, then the look away: “But you aren’t worthy of me.” Happens EVERY day.
Yep, another misogynist furious that women get to choose who they have sex with. Dude, SO DO GUYS. If two people are having sex, both of them have to agree to it. Otherwise it is rape. Everyone is their own “sexual gatekeeper.”
Robin offers a mild dissent, noting that some of the “immodest” dressers may be victims of sexual abuse. But they still deserve “righteous judgement,” at least when this judgement is ostensibly tempered by “love.”
I was once one of these women: a female friend was loving enough to take me bra shopping as a thirty-three year old adult and teach me about covering my body so as not to invite further abuse. Other people waited patiently and said nothing; this was a disservice to me as I could have transformed more quickly if people would have had the confidence to open their mouths and teach me the truth. Others condemned me without knowing my story, and I withdrew in offense.
While it is true that immodest dress is a form of aggression in feminist women, I want to bring to light that sexual abuse of young girls has become so prevalent that many women we see walking around today dressed as prostitutes may still be ensnared and imprisoned by their victim mentality brought about through no fault of their own due to horrendous acts of abuse against their bodies as children. I believe it is important that these women do not experience condemnation, but rather righteous judgment in love so as to bring about repentance from this behavior so that they may be healed and be examples to others.
Laura feels the need to reiterate that some women and girls really have no excuse for being slutty sluts:
I know teenage girls who are sweet and innocent, and have never been abused, who dress like tarts. It’s everywhere. They see it and they imitate it.
I’m interested how Laura knows that these girls haven’t been abused. Does she know the intimate details of all of these girls’ lives? Or does she just have powerful Abuse-dar?
Mary, meanwhile, argues that the real villains here aren’t women – but evil feministy feminists.
I have too many female friends who have had their hopes dashed/hearts broken/been humiliated at the hands of average-looking, low status guys to buy that women have all the power. These average young women were doing what they thought they were supposed to do, what they were told everyone was doing – having premarital sex, that is. They were told by feminists that it was as fun for them as it was for the men if only they would get into the spirit of it, that it would lead to ultimate happiness, that it would benefit them. Many girls of average attractiveness are giving themselves away, sometimes over and over again, to unworthy men and to their own heartbreak, while the strains of “Your Body is a Wonderland” play in the background. I don’t call that sexual power. That men are more vulnerable to visual cues doesn’t make all men innocent, just as some women’s extreme immodesty doesn’t make all women sexual power brokers. …
That’s what’s so diabolical about today’s extreme immodesty: many of these women are just trying to be relevant.
Apparently the readers of The Thinking Housewife, like many MRAs and other manosphere dudes, seem to have forgotten almost entirely the old stereotype of the hairy-legged, man-hating feminist; these days, they seem to assume that any woman who wears skirts above the knee and doesn’t hate sex is a feminist.
Setting aside the ridiculousness of the “sexy clothes are an assault on men” argument generally, I can’t help but wonder how many men out there – beyond Drealm and Franklin and assorted religious fundamentalists – actually, honestly feel “assaulted” when they see a woman they find attractive wearing something that shows off her figure. Somehow I suspect that most straight guys who are interested in sex – including most of those railing endlessly about evil sluts online — actually find this sort of thing … pleasant. Most of those guys complaining about immodest dress would, I think, feel rather disappointed if women actually decided to cover up – and not just because it would rob them of yet another excuse to demonize the ladies.
I think that one of the greatest mistakes that America made was to allow women the opportunity to vote. We should’ve never turned this over to women. … And these women are voting in the wrong people. They’re voting in people who are evil who agrees with them who’re gonna take us down this pathway of destruction.
And this probably was the reason that they didn’t allow women to vote when men were men. Because men in the good old days understood the nature of the woman. They were not afraid to deal with it. And they understood that, you let them take over, this is what would happen. …
A regular guest on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News?
Well, yeah, you guessed it: it’s door number three. Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, a Tea Party activist and founder of the group Brotherhood Organization of A New Destiny (BOND), said all of the above, and quite a lot of other outrageously misogynistic things, in a talk this March, and which is available on YouTube. Yet Hannity, who serves on the board of Peterson’s group, had him back on his show earlier this month, for an appearance during which Peterson described “liberal Democrat women” as “whores.” Raw Story, which discovered Peterson’s unlisted video on YouTube, offers many more delightful misogyny nuggets from Peterson.
Here’s the video of Peterson’s talk. The stuff about women and voting starts at about 8:30 in. But I suggest you watch the whole thing from the start; it’s a virtual smorgasbord of misogyny, seasoned with a bunch of stuff he simply made up about Sandra Fluke’s famous congressional testimony on birth control.
It would be nice if this sort of stuff was confined to the fringes of the manosphere, but alas, it’s everywhere.
